Risk and health

Risk provides a way of predicting and managing the future and accounting for past misfortune. Given the threat to ontological security of serious illness, in largescale societies with well well-developed health care systems, the uncertainties of illness are increasingly constructed as risks which can be understood and managed through scientific knowledge and through trust in medical science and the health professionals that represent it. In normal times, this system manages and minimises the uncertainties created by serious illness. The COVID-19 pandemic was a human disaster in which normal defences against illness were in many countries overwhelmed. This highlighted the nature of risk, its social construction and the ways in which it is used to inform difficult decisions such as the rationing of services during the pandemic.